My father’s generation, born between 1900 and 1927, was not generally socialized to be engaged with their children. They were not in the delivery room nor the first to hold a newborn. My mother's female relatives or best friends, not my father, accompanied her to deliveries. The wife was supposed to dominate and control the children and the home. Fathers rarely volunteered for childcare duties.
A man was supposed to dominate, theoretically at least, his workplace and maybe his yard. In the rural South, a middle-class white family frequently hired cheap labor to take care of chores around the house.
My father was a deeply rooted North Carolinian, an Unreconstructed Southerner, a gentleman of distinct Scottish Presbyterian ancestry and heritage. He could trace his lineage back to the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides, where his paternal ancestors lived since pre-history, or so it seemed, and to a ship that crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Wilmington (Brunswick County/Cape Fear River) in August 1739 as part of the Argyll Colony migration.
His mother, Anna Purcell, was also of Scottish heritage and could trace her ancestors in a southeastern corner of North Carolina to the Revolutionary War period. She considered herself part of the landed gentry in a rigid caste system inherited from Britain.
Given that we lived in Scotland County, NC, “the woods are filled with kinfolk,” my father often said. Since so many of the people he knew were related, he did not share his mother's rigid view of caste and married a woman, an educator, who descended from Jacksonian yeoman farmers, a small-d democrat who lived her belief that every child had the right to attentive teachers and education.
Surrounded by three much older siblings and their families, he lived nearly his entire life in the village of Wagram, NC, population 500, except for his college years in Chapel Hill, war years building ships in Wilmington, and a few years as a tobacco product salesman based in Durham (before he married).
Self-employed from 1946 to 1986, he traveled about four days a week across the Carolinas. "Wait till your father gets home" was supposed to be a threat and strike fear in children that they better behave. In my home, it never was a threat. Mother was the disciplinarian. If she pulled out the hairbrush, as she did almost daily when I was an obnoxious 11-year-old, that was a serious indication that I was going to get yet another spanking. She instilled expectations. By the time Dad arrived home, my crisis of defiance against these expectations had passed.
My father only rarely played games with his children. I can vividly remember him once or twice playing basketball and baseball with my sister and me. We loved having him play with us but it happened rarely. I don’t remember him ever tossing me a ball, though I threw a few in his direction along with the words, “think fast.”
My father wrote me about three letters in his life, mainly to complain about a bill I hadn't paid or to admonish me about bringing a Black friend to the beach cottage. After he died, I shared the three letters with my sisters. “Daddy wrote YOU letters?” they exclaimed as if I was privileged. “He never wrote us any.”
My father looked quite a bit like Jackie Gleason, and my siblings and I thought that he had a similar manner — gruff, loud, and funny. When in my early thirties I saw the movie “Nothing in Common,” with Gleason in the father role and Tom Hanks as the son, I thought that portrayed our relationship.
About six months before my father died, I spent one LONG weekend as his primary caregiver, to give my mother a respite and to try to make more of my peace with him. I told Mom to go away for the long Thanksgiving weekend, and I’d handle Daddy. Unfortunately, she took me up on my offer.
Actually, in retrospect, it was a good experience. It was an opportunity for me to finally appreciate some of his, what shall we call it, homespun wisdom. Daddy, like a lot of men of his era, was not one to talk about his feelings. He rarely if ever told me he loved me. For Christmas, the gifts I remember getting from him when he gave anything at all, were mouthwash, deodorant, and baby powder.
Each day of my caregiving duty, Dad would start a conversation with me like this: “Jim, are you regular?”
“What do you mean, Dad?”
“You know what I mean. Are you constipated a lot?… One way to reduce constipation is to drink plenty of water. Doctors say you should be drinking at least seven glasses of water a day.”
I scoffed at this advice. But in time, I discovered that I could tamp down my appetite and the temptation to overeat by drinking a lot of water.
He would infuriate me when he’d end a discussion with such conversation-stoppers as “because I said so” or “not necessarily.” I later found myself using the same words with my son when he was trying to prolong an argument or to avoid a chore.
Daddy would ask me how my work was going, and if I ever got any crank calls from readers who didn’t like what I had written. Sure, I said. Let it roll off your back was his advice. “Consider the day a loss if you don’t catch hell from someone.”
But he reminded me of the importance of keeping my boss happy, and not burning any bridges. “’The toes you step on today may be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow,” he’d say. And yet he spent most of his work life by himself as a traveling salesman, an independent scale, weight, and vending machine leaser and repairer. At its peak, I suppose his business had a couple of hundred clients in the Carolinas — mostly country stores and small retail outfits.
I recently — more than 35 years after his death — found a roll of quotes from his vending machines, which I suppose reflects his sense of humor.
He kept a messy desk but defied me or anyone else to clean it for him. “You toucha my desk, I breaka your face,” he’d say. I find myself making similar declarations. I know precisely where things are – under one pile or another.
Since I was his “nurse” for the long weekend, he took pleasure in ordering me around in a gruff and often impolite tone of voice. “Turn off the big light,” he’d scream.
“Say please,” I’d reply.
“Pwease,” he’d respond in baby talk.
“Now say thank you,” I’d say once I turned off the light.
Stubborn silence.
Then I’d torture him by flicking the light on and off until he’d say, in a genuine tone of gratitude, “thank you, Jim.”
As the long weekend of caregiving was coming to an end, he told me that my grade was “C-, not as good as your sister Kathy, and nowhere near as good as your mother. She gets an A.”
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I will always cherish the letter I received from my father shortly after my first wife and I separated. It was one of the few letters I ever received from him. A check was enclosed.
“Here’s a little something to help you through the storm, as my old German professor used to say,” he wrote. He did not express judgment of my situation. He did not tell me how he thought I had failed, or that my wife must be crazy. He simply expressed his love and concern and support, and his hope that I might eventually find someone like the woman he had been lucky enough to marry – “one of the sweetest gals on earth.” It was exactly what I needed to hear from him.
A Father’s Death
On a Thursday morning in June of 1988, my mother called to say I’d better come home. My father was in so much pain, she said, he couldn’t possibly last much longer. I asked to speak to him. She said she didn’t think he could speak, but I could perhaps say a few words to him. “I love you, Daddy,” I said. I could hear the death rattle in his throat. I could hear him struggling to speak. He was making a mammoth effort.
Finally, his familiar loud voice rang out. “I love you, Jim. I love you.”
By the time I arrived at his bedside, he was unable to speak. Each breath seemed like it was going to be his last. He was in so much pain. The nurses were injecting morphine every couple of hours. My sister Ann and I stayed with him all night. Surely it would end soon, we thought. But he kept on, all night and all through the next day. Sitting there beside his bed, holding his hand, I thought this must be something of what the crucifixion was like, certainly the closest thing to crucifixion that I’d ever witnessed. There were big, dark bruises on his body. How small and shriveled he looked in that bed compared to his familiar, overweight self. It was like the cancer had actually, literally, eaten him. The Apostles Creed had never moved me much. But one line from the creed kept cropping into my mind as I sat there: “He descended into hell.”
‘There’s So Much He Knows…’
Part of God’s grace for my father, I believe, came in the form of a fellow scale-lover, Bob Johnson. My father had trusted no one with the details of his business – not my mother, not me, not my sisters. We thought for sure he would die with 400 scales on location, another 200 in the three garages he had built to store them, and we would have no keys, no way to repair them, no way to locate the ones scattered across the small towns of two states. He had always seemed to us secretive and rather paranoid about competition and anyone seeking information about his work. But Bob Johnson somehow earned my father’s trust.
Bob was the last person outside my family to see my father. About nine o’clock on Saturday night, he and his wife Diane appeared at my father’s hospital door. For nearly two hours we sat together beside my father’s bed. He quietly told me things about my father I had never heard before. Though my father by that point was not responding to any communication, the doctor had told us just hours earlier that hearing is the last of the senses to go. “Speak as if your father can hear every word that you are saying,” he said.
And so, when Bob spoke, I felt he was speaking not only to me, but to my father as well, reminding him who he was. It was, I believe, what gave him the peace to let go. He told me about the country store owners who were asking about my father. He recalled my father’s advice about which restaurants were good to eat in and which hotels were good places to stay at. “There’s so much your father knows, so much he has kept to himself, so much that’s gonna go with him,” Bob said. “I just wish I had more time with him.”
Bob and Diane left quietly at 11 p.m. Exhausted from 36 hours without sleep, I fell onto the cot next to his bed and tried to relax. Half awake, half-asleep, this image kept coming to my mind of Christ greeting and holding my father, of my father actually turning into Christ. In one sense it was absurd. In another sense, it seemed to me to be the essence of Christianity: Christ, taking on my father’s pain and transforming him.
In the pain which he could no longer deny, my father seemed finally to me to be moving toward what the Apostle Paul described as “mature manhood, the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
Father’s Funeral: Have I Died And Gone to Heaven?
The next seven days proved to be equally intense. So many people came to my parents’ house to pay their respects. I saw people I hadn’t seen in 20 years – a cast of characters from my past that made me feel like I was the one who had died and gone to heaven and was seeing them all again.
They reminded me of my father in happy times, and I felt almost literally lifted up by them. In an almost mystical way, I sensed they were also lifting up my father’s spirit by their words, their hugs, or simply by their presence.
I have not considered myself a particularly mystical person, but at the precise moment when the minister at the memorial service spoke the words, “he is raised from the dead,” SOMETHING happened – I presume it was the air conditioner or the fan clanking into gear with the palpable sound of an accelerating motor. Whatever it was, it sent chills up my spine.
In my eulogy, I summed up Daddy’s life and quoted a characterization my nephew Ted Vance wrote of his grandfather for a high school English class.
“Since my characterization has to be on an older person, I am going to do it on, you guessed it, my grandfather, alias Gramps,” Ted said. “My mother’s father is sort of out of the ordinary…his job is selling scales!…You know, those penny (now a nickel) scales that tell us our weight, our fortune, and have a mirror so we can see all that hair on our legs…He practically does what he wants in life…But there’s no one quite like him, no where, and we love him for it.”
I concluded by saying:
“Often times we wondered how we ever managed to live with John Buie. Now we wonder how we’ll manage to live without him. I half-expect to see him back at the house when I get home, watching his memorial service on TV. I can see him smiling and hear him saying, one last time, “Jim, cut off the big light!”
“OK, Daddy. I love you. We all love you, and will remember you…as you remember us.”
I remember my father, the gift of his life, and the gift of his death. I missed him especially the next Christmas Eve, when the family gathered, sang and, as always, acted out “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
I can see him waving his elbows like a swan a’ swimming or flitting across the room like a lady dancing. I can see him joining in a family aerobics exercise led by my sister Celeste, bending to touch his toes and yelling at me not to take his picture while he does it. I can see him sitting on the sofa with his arm around my mother reminiscing about his children as babies. He has a big smile on his face. He is happy, we are happy, and we are all together again.
My Favorite! Above Exceptional! Absolutely Wonderful Read! Thank you for sharing!
Wonderful. I wish my mother in law from Pikeville, were alive to read. Heartfelt and colorful. God bless.